322: 10 Trends for Week 13

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zacher, Retha Jay Jake Zacher Reason. What's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharesen, the editor in chief at fandel and at number fire dot com. And this is episode three hundred and twenty two of the Late Round Podcast, one of the many shows that are part of the Fan Duel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. So, given this is Thanksgiving week, I wanted to just say at the top that there won't be a mailbag episode this week, but the matchup show is still gonna get done and it should be out late Wednesday afternoon, which means you'll get two Late Round podcast episodes in one day. And since I'm on the topic, happy Thanksgiving. Now, before looking at this week's ten trends, I wanted to let you guys know about a special Thanksgiving week offer from Number Fire. Whether you're betting on the Thanksgiving games, setting your DFS lineups, just getting ready for the fantasy playoffs, number Fire Premium covers everything normally as much as forty nine ninety nine. You can try Premium today for just five dollars when you sign up with promo code Touchdown. That's promo code Touchdown visit number fire dot com slash Premium for more details. Promo only applies for first time users through the end of Cyber Monday. This first trend this week is all about Lamar Jackson's dominance. Right now, Baltimore Quarterbacks are averaging twenty eight point seven points per game. The opponents that they face this year have allowed an average of eighteen and a half points per game, and that includes the game that they played against Baltimore. That means that Lamar Jackson is outperforming that average by ten point two points. And it's really a little bit more. To give you some context, Kansas City is in second place when it comes to looking at their points per game versus how many points per game their opponents have allowed, and Kansas City is outperforming their opponents average by four point nine points. Now, Patrick Mahomes's injury brought that down a little bit, but it's likely still about half of what Lamar Jackson is doing. It's gonna be a fun offseason talking about where to draft Lamar Jackson next year. So, as you know, Jordan Howard hasn't played in each of the eagles last two games. Miles Sanders has taken on a bigger role as a result, handling about sixty four percent of the team's running back rushes and eleven percent of the Eagles targets. Before the injuries, Sanders was averaging a running back rush share that was thirty percentage points lower, and his target share is about two percentage points lower. And then all the while, Sanders played eighty four percent and eighty five percent of the team snaps without Jordan Howard. Those are by far the highest snap share marks of any Eagles running back this season. The thing is, Sanders hasn't been all that great in fantasy. He's averaged nine PPR points per game in these two contests without Jordan Howard, but the Eagles also scored nineteen total points in those two contests. It's kind of hard for any running back to produce in that kind of environment. The point is, if Howard continues the miss time, Sanders should be able to bounce back in a pretty big way. The peripherals are actually pretty awesome. Trend three has to do with Aaron Jones and the fact that the Packers just haven't been throwing him the football. He's been the RB forty five, the RB three, and then the RB forty eight over his last three games, but over his last two he's only seen one target. Across his first nine games, he was averaging over five targets per game that was good for almost a fifteen percent target chair, and on Sunday, Jamal Williams saw a twenty two percent target chair that was good for eight targets. So the Packers are still technically throwing to running backs, but Jamal Williams has benefited from it, not Aaron Jones. The thing is Williams hasn't run a ton more routes than Aaron Jones has over this time, according to Pro Football Focus, so I do expect Aaron Jones to see an uptick and target chair moving forward. Jared Cook has now essentially played four games with Drew Brees this season. He's seen at least a twenty one percent target chair in half of those games played, including two of his last three, and speaking of his last three games, which are the three that he's played since returning from injury, he's ranked as a tight end eight eleven to three in weekly scoring. During those contests, Jared Cook's actually been a top twelve tight end one in five straight games played. I'm going to be a total dad right now, but you could say that Jared is cooking. The next three trends are all related to the RAMS, but I think they're all important and interesting to bring up, so I'm rolling with it. This one is that Jared Gop hasn't thrown a touchdown pass since the second quarter of a game against Cincinnati that was played all the way back in Week eight, and actually since that game was played outside the country, he hasn't thrown a touchdown in the United States since Week seven. You guys might remember me talking about his two games stretch against Atlanta and Cincinnati on a fifteen transaction show earlier this year, and then after those two games were up, he was a drop candidate. And it's because he's faced Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Baltimore in each of his last three games. Even still, regardless of matchup, not throwing a touchdown pass in those three games is pretty horrific. The next RAMS trend, which is trend six, is that during this brutal three game stretch, Cooper Cup has been the wide receiver eighty eight, the wide receiver forty five, and the wide receiver thirty nine, and weekly wide receiver scoring He's averaged just five point nine points per game during this time. From weeks one through eight, he was averaging twenty point nine points per game. Now, this obviously has a lot to do with the offense playing so poorly, but Cup's also seen his target chair drop by about ten percent in this split. Fortunately, a matchup against Arizona this week should help. And the last Rams trend is that Todd Gurley played ninety six percent of LA's snaps on Monday night. That was the highest mark of any Rams running back all year. Gurley's actually hit a rate above seventy six percent just one other time. I think we're looking at a situation with the Rams where they're desperate for wins in order to stay competitive and luck into a playoff spot, so they're utilizing Gurley at a slightly higher rate. The problem is what I talked about on last week's Mailbag show, They're still not using Gurly enough as a receiver. He had just an eight percent target chhair against the Ravens and the Rams still have by far the running back target share in the league this year. So his fantasy production isn't that surprising When you get a running back in an offense that's not producing, and then that offense isn't using that running back as a pass catcher. Poor performances happen. All right, we're done talking about the Rams and we're on to trend eight. Anthony Miller has seen twenty three percent of Chicago's targets over the last two weeks. He played a lot of snaps in Week eleven against the Rams, but his snaphare actually dropped to just fifty five percent against the Giants this past week. That's not the best trend, but the usage is. And now Taylor Gabriel has a concussion. I may or may not talk about Anthony Miller on the Matchup show this week. DeAndre Hopkins saw Will Fuller back in the lineup this past week, and he also saw a decrease in target share. From weeks one through seven. With will Fuller in that Texans lineup, Hopkins averaged a twenty nine percent target share per game. Then from weeks eight through eleven, so three games, that target chair jumped to almost thirty eight percent, and then in week twelve, with will Fuller back, we saw it at twenty eight point six percent, so it fell again. Now, obviously Hopkins still produced and he still will produce, though a match up against New England is going to be tough this week, but Fuller has made an impact on DeAndre Hopkins's target share this year. The last trend is that Russell Wilson has now finished outside QB one territory in four of his last five games. He's been QB eighteen, seventeen, fourteen, and nineteen in those four contests. There have been some tough matchups against San Francisco and Baltimore in that stretch, but he also underperformed against Atlanta and Philadelphia. From a fantasy perspective, you're still likely plugging and playing Russell Wilson, but things are trending in the wrong direction for fantasy purposes. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribed to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and of course don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone. Like I said at the time up, I'll have the matchup show out later today, so I'll talk to you then